Day: July 17, 2002

Some of you may be familiar with DMOZ, the open directory project that replaced Netscape’s old directory and attempts to be the open community-maintained alternative to the increasingly creaky Yahoo! directory. I just stumbled across MusicMoz, which attempts to be a definitive directory for music.

Why is this cool? Well, think how important IMDB is—it’s pretty much the de facto authoritative source for information about movies and TV shows on the Internet. If you want the equivalent for music, where do you go? What site can allow you to trace a musician’s progress from band to band, combine a directory with a discography and have a clean and searchable interface?

Well, nowhere, really. In my iTunes scripts, I link to Google instead. But MusicMoz might be a cool alternative. And they’re looking for category editors…more…

Yahoo: HIV-Positive TV Muppet Worries U.S. Lawmakers. The article quotes a letter sent to PBS as saying “We look forward to working with you to ensure that only age and culturally appropriate programs air on PBS” and says that the letter “gives [the president of PBS] until Friday to answer such questions as the amount of money PBS dedicates to ‘Sesame Street,’ how much is being earmarked for the new Muppet, whether she will be introduced to the United States and whether corporate underwriters might participate in the decision-making process.”

I can’t see straight, I’m so angry about this foolishness.

First of all, the new HIV-positive Muppet is on the South African version of Sesame Street, where 1.1 million young people are HIV positive. At what age, precisely, is it time to educate kids in an environment like that about what it means to live with someone who is very sick but still needs support?

Second of all, what a caring attitude from our lawmakers, who have nothing better to do than to worry about the lives of children in South Africa. Bullshit. This is a transparent stroke-the-archconservative move that makes Quayle’s taking on Murphy Brown look like kid stuff.

Besides, the Committee on Energy and Commerce does have something better to do: worry about the continuing fallout from Enron, Worldcom, and other corporate meltdowns, and address the painful question of whether Dick Cheney and George Bush have been guilty of the same ethical lapses they’re now reluctantly calling the business community on.

I’ve been pretty good about the whole East Coast-West Coast time difference so far, but this morning it bit me in the butt. Yeah, Steve’s keynote was at 9 am this morning… EAST COAST TIME. So I missed all the fun. Also I forgot to download Quicktime 6 final, so I couldn’t watch the end of the live stream…

It looks like the rumor sites (including CNET) nailed just about everything though: Jaguar to come out in late August, ahead of schedule; new 17″ iMac; iTools to have a name change to .Mac.

What they missed, though is pretty important:

iTunes 3 incorporates audio book technology from Audible and has gone OS X only

iPod has gone up to 20 GB, now thinner, sports a remote on the earbud control and new software that does a calendar (plus earphones that won’t stretch your ears)